How nature metaphors shade technology companies from scrutiny

IN 2006, at an industry conference, thenGoogle-CEO Eric Schmidt introduced a now ubiquitous term: "the cloud."

- LEO KIM

Here was a grand technological shift, Schmidt explained, that would let information exist simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Naming it "the cloud" made the change sound almost natural. Your information is not in a massive bank of servers in Nevada; it is, as he put it, "in a 'cloud' somewhere." Data as a nimbus floating above.

The cloud is just one of many linguistic elisions between the artificial and natural worlds. These appropriations span the gamut: Firefox, OpenSea, OnStar, Airbnb, Apple (Yosemite, Monterey, Big Sur), internet surfing, neural networks, mouses, viruses. Sue Thomas a writer and scholar of digital culture-argues that bringing nature into the lexicon lets technologists position their domain as "a real and integrated extension to human experience." This framing brings a sense of comfort to complex innovations but encourages us to not think too deeply, either. As researchers have noted, the phrase "data mining" does not exactly clarify the privacy concerns at play when Meta sorts through your personal information.